A Story - Part Four

Click here for Part One, here for Part Two, and here for Part Three

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Eventually, he found himself in the hospital's emergency room. He often did. Standing amid the sea-green walls, orange, welded-down chairs, and the worried and weeping faces, Winnick observed a dark-skinned man blankly feed coins into a soda machine. He pressed his palm against a large, bright drink logo and watched his drink plummet into view with a rich thunk. The man retrieved the can, opened it, and then just stood there. Winnick thought his eyes looked disappointed. This isn't what I wanted from my weekend, they said. At that moment, another man approached him hurriedly and hissed something. The first man flushed and his eyes showed alarm. As the two of them rushed away, the first one let his full soda fall into a nearby trashcan.

How did they do it? Winnick thought. How did they wait here for hours on end with their brains sparking on terrible thoughts and their hands turning the pages of magazines so quickly that nothing could be read, only to eventually have the inevitable worst confirmed by an apologetic man who barely had time for them, so that finally they could get into their cars and drive home? How did one drive home from that sort of news? How did you remember to make the correct turns? It seemed to Winnick that under such circumstances, a red traffic light could be so soul-crushing as to finish the job that losing your loved one had started. And then you pull up to your home, turn off the engine, walk to your front door, go inside, and do what? Fix a drink? Go to bed? Turn on the TV? Winnick imagined the dark-skinned man with the untouched soda going home later and eating a sandwich, with tears in his eyes.

Winnick sat down in one of the orange chairs. It always amazed him how quiet it was here. This was a place where people stuck with their own, and everyone kept their heads down.

"Sir?"

Winnick looked up. A nurse, a dry-looking woman of about forty, was staring down at him. She didn't appear to be wearing make-up and had freckles sprayed across her forehead. He'd seen her before.

"What?" he said.

"You know what. We've told you. There's cops here, and I can go get one who'll make you leave, or you can just leave by yourself."

"I'm waiting for my brother," Winnick said. "We're waiting to find out what's wrong with our mom. He should be right around here."

"No, you're not," said the nurse. "I know you're not. You just come here and sit and stare and you scare people. You scare me."

"Not this time," said Winnick. "This time's for real. There's something really wrong with my mom. I'm worried."

The nurse watched him for several seconds.

"What's her name?" she asked.

"...Jane," he said.

"Jane what?"

Winnick gaped. He always knew that one day his brain would fail him when he could least afford it. His silence stretched on.

"Fuck it," the nurse said, looking around quickly. "I don't got time for this shit. Linda, where's Officer Brady?"

Winnick stood up and walked away from her.

"Linda, get Officer Brady."

As he passed through the automatic doors, Winnick spat on the floor.

* * * * *

He sat on a bench in the dark near the emergency room parking lot. He was waiting for a nurse to leave. He hoped it would be her, but it didn't have to be, and it wasn't. The nurse who finally left after what seemed like a long time was a good deal younger, though not, Winnick found it interesting to note, especially pretty. She was blonde, yes, but also had what Winnick had referred to as a "weak chin". And her arms were as thin as straws.

It was easy to follow her home, because she walked. This was a break. He'd thought he might have to get a cab, making the cabbie a potential witness, or simply let her go, or maybe on the same bus with her. But she walked, alone, through the breezily humid night air. It felt like a Southern night. Winnick knew what that felt like, having at one time in his life walked the streets at night in that part of the country. Those weren't great days.

She lived in a townhouse, and he watched from across the street as she dug around in her purse for her house keys. As she rattled them free, Winnick considered that he simply didn't have the energy to try and talk his way into her home, or even to talk to her at all. It had been a long couple of days, and he simply wanted to get on with it, so as she slid the key into the lock of her front door, Winnick took long, light strides across the street, making as little sound as possible so that when she was pushing open her door he was springing up the front steps behind her, shoving her forward into the door, which banged and shook against the wall inside. She fell against a set of steps leading up, her nurse's cap tumbling from her head as she grunted, "What?"

Winnick gently closed the door behind him. It was dark here, in the woman's foyer -- he hadn't given her a chance to turn on the lights. He kicked out at her, in the vicinity of her ribs, and her hands and nails scrabbled at him as he slapped his hands along the walls, trying to find a lightswitch. When he found one, hit it, and drenched them with a kind of medicinal white light that put Winnick in mind of the hospital they'd both just left, she spoke again, shrieking, "Get out!" Her face was wild, like a mental patient about to be locked up for good. Quickly, he hunched down towards where she was still sitting against the stairs, and punched her as hard as he could in the jaw. She collapsed sideways like he'd just driven a bolt into her brain. Grabbing her by her long hair, he dragged her across the hardwood floors, into the shadows of her home. He turned on every light he could find until he was able to locate her kitchen, which was where he took her next. There was an iron pot in the sink, which he filled with water. Standing over her, he turned the pot upside down over her bruised and slack face. The water landed on her with a slap, causing her eyes to flutter and roll in their sockets. Winnick filled the pot and doused her again. She gasped and sputtered, and this time kept her eyes more or less open. Winnick said, "I'm going to murder you." She said, "What?" "I'm going to murder you," he repeated, and she coughed and said, "I don't..." "Can you hear me?" he asked. "Yes, I'm, I can't..." she said. "What's your name?" he asked. "Can't...can't you just leave and go home?" she asked. "What's your name?" he asked again. "Jennifer," she said. "Are you lying to me?" he asked. "No," she said. "Please don't kill me," she said. "Who are you?" she asked. "Jennifer," he said, "I'm the man who is going to murder you," and by this time he had a large kitchen knife, like the one he'd used last night, in his right hand, and he used it to slash at her face and cut into her abdomen, from which he was eventually able to remove some of her organs, which he later placed in her bed upstairs.

She had a living room that seemed so quiet to Winnick, under the circumstances, and there was a deep leather easy chair. He sunk into it. He believed, from what he'd seen when he was upstairs, that Jennifer had a roommate, another nurse. Presumably, this nurse was working a different shift and wouldn't be home until much later. Winnick was undecided as to what he should to about that: leave, or wait for her? He sat in the chair to think about it. And then he noticed, on the squat glass table to his left, there was a card, mostly eggshell in color, with golden lettering and curls on the front. The front of the card said IN YOUR TIME OF SORROW... Winnick opened the card, and on the inside cover was a handwritten message that said:

Jennifer,

I am so sorry for you loss. I can't even imagine what you must be feeling. Does it help to know that I think your sister is finally safe now? I think she finally feels well again.

You were such a good sister to her. And she was to you, too. Jennifer, you weren't lucky to have her, and she wasn't lucky to have you. You both deserved each other. You were so good for each other. I hope you can remember that and think about that in the sad times ahead. She loved you as much as you loved her, and she is going to watch down on you and guide you during your good times and your bad times. She's there with you now.

I love you so much. Take care of yourself and be safe.

Janine

Winnick thought that this card was very beautiful. What a sad girl Jennifer must have been, to see such tragedy at her age. But she was with her sister now, at least. That was something.

THE END

A Story - Part Three

Click here for Part One and here for Part Two.

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He turned and walked out, scanning for the elevators. He found them around a corner, banked against a giant mirrored wall. The light around the elevators was dimmed, draining into sepia, because maybe the hotel managers wanted people to think they were in an old photograph. Winnick shook his head at the absurdity of it all. That would never work, he thought. He had yet to hit a button, and he held Scott's wallet in his hands. Alone for a moment, he began to wade through its contents, lifting out the hotel room keycard between two fingers, while his thumbs kept the wallet gaping wide. He found, in the same inner sleeve as the keycard, a slip of paper with what appeared to be a room number scribbled across it. Slipping the wallet into his back pocket, he looked at the paper, turned it over, scanned for more writing, maybe a little note, or a sketch. Nothing. Winnick felt briefly disappointed in Scott, but he shook it off. He quickly memorized the room number, and then at the slip of paper.

Hit hit a button. He heard a ding, then the easy rumble of an elevator door sliding open. A hunched over young man wearing a white baseball cap with a giant floppy F on the front stepped out and walked quickly away from Winnick without looking at him. Winnick watched him go, then stepped into the den-like quiet of the elevator. He hit another button, marveling at the apparent sleepiness of the big hotel, and he heard another ding. He stepped into the hallway.

A soft, syrupy light settled over everything out here. What was with the light in this place? he wondered. It made him drowsy. He tried to figure out what financial motives the hotel management could have for trying to make their customers sleepy with all this brown half-light, but he couldn't come up with anything. So he walked down the hall, looking for the room number. He found it after about five minutes. He swiped the keycard, and gently opened the door.

He stepped in, and immediately noted the white kitchen to his right. The kitchen was the only source of light. The sink was silver and dripping and filled with a plate, a glass, a pot streaked with pasta, and a saucer that looked like someone had opened a vein into it. Winnick walked quietly into the kitchen, which smelled of cold, wet food. He bent his head over the sink, squinted at the saucer, as though it were a fly-leg under a microscope. He sniffed. Not blood, because that would be odd. A sauce, he supposed, with which he was unfamiliar. The plate had gobs of tomato and onions and bread, and other bits of whatever, and the wet sink odor of it all put him off. He turned from the sink and found the knife rack, from which he extracted the big kitchen knife, which had apparently not been used to prepare the dinner Scott had been unable to get home for. Standing there in the middle of the kitchen, Winnick looked into the shadows of the rest of the room. A chair and a sofa hunkered down in the dark, the large box of the TV cut big black corners into the blue evening light coming through the curtains on the far wall. Maybe he'd flip some lights on later. Probably not, though.

He walked out of the kitchen and turned right, the only place the hallway into the bedroom could be. He made no sound. He found the bedroom door as if by instinct, turned the knob so gently, pushed it open so gently, walked in, and heard the soft, sweet breathing of the pretty young woman who loved the man Winnick had left cooling and stinking in a garbage heap somehwere back that-a-way. Winnick felt such sadness for her. How could she ever have envisioned such an outcome for herself or her husband? And if she had, what could she had done? Would not marrying Scott have saved her? Would she have preferred nights of unbroken loneliness, if this was the alternative? Would marriage to someone other than Scott have led her life in another, safer direction, one free of such unthinkable horrors? Would she have loved that man as she loved Scott? If the answer was no, would that have been a trade she would have been willing to make? And if not, what a sweet young woman she must be.

Winnick got slowly into bed with her. She was warm, and wearing something that felt almost slippery; it must be terribly comfortable, Winnick thought. He cautiously found a small lamp on his side of the bed and turned it on.

The woman stirred, and turned her head, with its pretty tangles of sleepy hair.

"Baby?" she murmured. "I'm sorry, I got tired."

Winnick put his hand over her mouth and slammed his knee into her stomach. She went rigid and bleated into his palm. He showed her the knife and she immediately began to cry.

"I cut open your husband's stomach about an hour ago," he said, sad at the words.

He could feel her saliva and her lips, even her tongue, against his palm. Her tears poured back into her ears and hair.

"Here we go," he said. "There won't be anymore." He stabbed her hard in the abdomen, twice, paused to watch her, and then stabbed her three more times. The bed was becoming a lake of blood. Her feet pounded the bed's sheet and comforter. He squeezed tight on her mouth. He kept stabbing her, and her fury began to drain out of her. "This is how it ends. So now you know." He cut her throat and gouged out her eyes with his thumbs.

He took a shower while holding the knife, which later went into the trash. He took one of Scott's topcoats to cover the gore on his clothes, and ditched his shoes in favor of a nice pair of boots. He left the hotel without a glance at anybody or anything, hailed a cab outside, and let out a relieved sigh when he opened his own front door. He undressed, showered again, put on a robe, stuck his clothes in the garbage, got into bed, and lay awake for a long time.

* * * *

The next day was Saturday. Tomorrow was Sunday, and Sundays were for calling his brother's home and hanging up if anyone answered. Saturday was usually something of a free day. He rolled out of bed at 9:22, his room lit by a cloudy, curtained haze of a sun, softening all the shades of blue in his bedroom, of which there were several. Mounds of clothing were kicked through on his way to the bathroom, where he showered for the third time in under twelve hours. This shower was the hottest of the three, the steam so thick and piping that it seemed to effect his breathing a little. He reddened comfortably beneath the spray, and hung his head in, what was it, shame? He toweled off, took his pills, brushed his teeth, slipped into his thickest robe, and went back to his bedroom. He scooped a shoebox out from beneath his bed, took it to his kitchen table, opened it, and scattered the contents before him.

This was a collection of scraps. Index cards, dollar bills, Post-Its, formerly crumpled notebook and legal paper, typing paper, napkins, all scribbled over. Lists, notes, letters, poems, warnings, pleadings, apologies, ultimatums. Drawings, story ideas. Winnick could not remember how long he'd been collecting these. Two years? Something like that, he supposed. Regardless, he'd begun by accident during one of his walks. It was in his nature to walk the streets, during the day as well as at night, just to observe things and people and places. Park benches were often a destination for him. He would seek them out in areas busy with pedestrians, and he would plant himself, and he would warmly stare at them all, taking note of people's moods, noticeable in eyes and strides and breathing. Angry people, for instance, had small eyes and rapid breathing. Happy people had soft eyes and slow breathing. Sad people walked as though the bones in their legs were degenerating with each step, which maybe they were and that was why some of them were sad. Also, sad people's eyes looked like those of sleepy fish. Sad people wore sweatpants and sweaters.

This natural interest in his environment and those who shared it with him surely led him to this current fascination, because it was while observing people one day that he found his first scrap. Not a scrap, to be honest, as it was a full sheet of unlined paper, folded square twice over and left almost in the middle of the bench. He didn't unfold it at first, but waiting until there was a lull in foot traffic. When he did unfold it, he saw it was a letter, written in blue ink. It said:

Hailey,

You told my parents that you think you lost Jesus. I think that's very sad. Why did this happen? Times are tough I know, for me too, but for you more. I know. I'm going to tell you something straight, it's a shit life sometimes and I'm done pretending it's not. But you can't lose Jesus! Because Jesus is all there is. Do you know why? Because he's the only one who can love you forever.

There was a bit more after that, but it was a variation on the "I care about you and you should call me" sentiment that ended all such letters. Winnick was nonetheless enthralled by that first part, and tried to imagine who had written it. He knew it was a woman, because she'd signed it (Brittany), and he thought she was probably young. And he thought she might be black, because he was given to understand that black people often talked about Jesus. Beyond that, he had to admit, he had trouble seeing her, and imagining her life. Her life must be absolutely packed with loss, though, and apparently also compassion for others, which impressed Winnick to no end. To know so much suffering, and to still find it in herself to care about her friend! He'd read that letter twelve times in a row right then and there, and from that day on had sought out more letters like it, wherever and whenever he happened to be walking.

He'd found few of that caliber over the years, but he'd found many other scraps of thoughts and emotion, scribbled or scrawled and left for strangers throughout the city. He sifted through them now.

Here was an interesting one. A list, on a large Post-It. It said:

candy
milk
porno
chips?
bread?

And another one. Not a list this time, but a personal note on a small piece of legal paper. It said:

Dennis - You hurt me with what you said about my legs. I go to the doctor about them almost all the time! But whatever, your fat! - Joan

Another list, a sort of "to do" list this time. Or no, more like an attempt to structure a day:

take a bath
eat my breakfast
play sega for 1 hr.
go to cemetery and see mom
write letters
eat my lunch
play Nintendo until dinner
eat my dinner

Now a warning:

Keep knocking jackass I'll call the cops or I'll punch a whole through your face! Whats it like to eat shit my friend? Ha ha youre a clown. Maybe thats why we're always laughing. Its not because youre funny cuz youre not. Youll be eating shit even more too if you keep knocking jackass. So keep it up it'll be so funny if you do! Youre funeral, jackass!

A lament:

I miss you and wish you would call. When you don't I get sick. I think about why you don't like me anymore, and I don't have an answer. But I'm truly sorry for whatever I did.

A non-sequitor, a melancholy one:

Peter - You left again. Most times I just sleep.

There were several shopping lists, like that first one. It struck Winnick that something as trivial as a shopping list could linger with him in a way that even some of these nakedly emotional notes and letters could not. It was curious, but when you read something like this next one -

butter
cheese
bread
mustard
whisky
beer
magazines
altoids
sandwich things
whisky

- you had to stop a moment, didn't you? Winnick did, at any rate, and when he read that list it swept through him like a slow breeze. It struck him in the way he supposed other people were deeply impacted by reading To Kill a Mockingbird or Moby-Dick, or some other great novel. Winnick guessed he was a bit of a fool, because who else cared as little for art or literature as Winnick did, but at the same time could almost be awe-struck by a sloppily spelled grocery list?

He was beginning to feel restless, staring at this heap of paper. He watched it for a few more minutes, fluttering a little from the air conditioner's breath coming from the vent in the ceiling above the table. He put his hands on top of the heap to try and settle it, and its many corners rustled against his fingers. He didn't want to press it too firmly.

Well. That was enough. He began to gather it all up again and put it back in the shoebox. Once it was all stored back safely underneath his bed, he got dressed and ventured outside. He wanted to go walking today.

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END PART THREE

A Story - Part Two

Click here for Part One

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This dark part of the street would soon lighten up, he knew. He'd killed this Scott person just past the point in the city where things stopped being fun, or, rather, things stopped trying to be fun. Past a certain point, the are couldn't even sustain a barbershop, though presumably the people in this section had hair just like everywhere else. It was sad, and a little perplexing. Winnick knew that there were perfectly good explanations for these sorts of unofficial borderlines in cities throughout the world, but those explanations could only cover the rational ground. There was something else there, Winnick had always believed, something having to do with a general sort of sadness, that no one could really figure out, if they even noticed it, which he imagined most people didn't. Winnick felt it, but was at as much of a loss as everyone else seemed to be.

But all that was behind him now, because look, here were lights, and people, and bars and restaurants. That sort of thing. As the number of people increased, as he moved with the tide along crosswalks, he began to want to strike out at them. Not because they were, or appeared to be, having fun, while some other small group of people down the street were staying in for the night and probably having less fun, because he didn't truly care about that. He wanted to punch them, he believed, because there were just too many of them.

As he cross the street, the night around him lit back up into dusk, he fell in step behind a young man walking between two young women. Both women wore jeans that were similarly tight and similarly low-slung. Each girl had an arm wrapped around one of the man's, and whenever the man turned his head, Winnick could see his drunk, oblong grin.

"What?" the young man said to the girl on his right.

"She said," said the girl, "that she didn't want to meet me again, like, ever again. She said, 'I don't let people treat me that way, if if you're going to treat me that way, I don't ever want to meet you again.' She said, 'People like that aren't my friends'."

"I guess she doesn't have many friends, then," said the other girl.

"I know, right?" said the first, and by then all three of them were across the street, and Winnick lost the thread of the conversation, once it had jammed up against the crowding voices of the people moving like cars on a freeway all around them.

What time was it? Winnick though. Around 9:30, by his watch. He put his hands in his pockets. He passed by the entrance to a bar, outside of which sat a big bald guy wearing a black shirt, his hand out to receive the ID of a young kid hoping to get in. Winnick heard the bouncer say, "What's up, bud?" before he lost their voices, too. To his left now was an old couple, both dressed as though the casual attire of all the young people all around them were part of somebody else's night out, and had nothing to do with them. They were standing by a parked car at a meter, the car squat and blue and newly washed. The old man, much taller than she, had his hands on the hips of the old woman. She had her head tilted up, her lips ready for a kiss, her face white and powdered and crumbling like a squeezed doughnut.

Winnick passed them. As he did, he heard the sound of scuttling paper, and when he looked down he saw that he had absently kicked a tightly folded sheet of yellow legal paper along the sidewalk ahead of him. He brightened, and bent swiftly to pick it up, moving to the side as he did, away from the constantly moving mass of people. The paper was crisp, and Winnick thought it had been dropped recently. Opening it, and seeing that it was a personal note, he thought hopefully that it had been dropped on the way to being delivered.

Dear Paul,

Quit stealing my CD's and pills. Don't come to my house anymore. I will come to you're house.

Richard

Winnick read the note four times before refolding it and putting it in his pocket. His mind was racing. The note was to be hand-delivered, obviously, but to where? To Paul's house? Why a note? Why not pick up the phone? He tried to imagine, as he always did in these circumstances, the kind of person who would write such a note, and what history existed between these two people that would lead to this. A history of stealing, apparently, as well as either addiction or health problems, or both. Winnick's mind couldn't latch on to anything more specific or interesting, however, and he began to grow frustrated. He clenched his fists, back against the wall of a restaurant as people filed past, and then he forced himself to sigh. There was no time for this now anyway, he thought. When he got home later, he could spend time on the note, but not now. The reason he couldn't figure it out was because there were too many other things to be thought about and to do.

The Global filled his vision as he walked on. The whole thing was a sort of casual white, like an envelope, with dark blue awnings scattering its lower floors. He could see the outside dining portion of one of the hotel's restaurants, all black with light orange lamps casting a faint glow on people against the rails holding bottled beer, or sitting at tables, crowded over their food. He crossed the street diagonally, walking briskly straight for the Global's main entrance. He probably reeked of beer, and would take care of that in the restroom. Or probably no one would notice anyway.

Once int he lobby, Winnick stopped for a moment to gather himself. His instinct was to plow on ahead at full-speed, now that his blood was pumping and his brain was spinning, but he knew he shouldn't. Not that he knew for sure, but he believed that when he got like this his eyes went glassy, and maybe even shined unnaturally, which would be a big giveaway to anyone who looked at him for more than a few seconds, so while he slowed his walk as he neared the center of the lobby, he began blinking rapidly to erase the gleam. He felt that by the time he reached the ring of deep leather sofas in the lobby's center he had achieved this. The sofas were soft and comfortably brown, and at first he thought he should sit here and relax for a bit, but he discarded that notion. Off to the left of the white and nearly empty lobby was a darker room. The hotel bar, called Bozeman's. Winnick went in.

He sat on a stool at the bar and laid his forearms on the hard wood. Two stools down sat a middle-aged man, grinning up at a basketball game on an overhead television. This man was smoking, and there was an ashtray by his elbow. Cigarette smoke curled towards Winnick, and he flapped his hand at it, like he was waving away gnats. The man glanced at Winnick.

"I'm sorry," he said, shifting his ashtray a few inches towards himself.

"That's okay," said Winnick, putting on the face he believed would be most appropriate. "I'm in a bar, after all."

"That's true. I try to be polite about it anyway, but if you'd kicked up more of a fuss, I probably would have had to fight you."

Winnick laughed as the bartender approached.

"What can I get you?" the bartender -- young, fat and bald -- asked.

"A Foghorn," said Winnick. "And a shot of bourbon, whatever's cheap."

The bartender said, "You got it," and he walked off. He was back shortly with Winnick's beer and shot, and Winnick paid him.

"You know what's funny?" said the middle-aged man. "Or maybe not really funny, as such, but I stay here every time I'm in this city, which is a lot, and I come to this bar most nights I'm here, and none of these sons of bitches ever seem to remember me."

Was this man angry? Winnick thought.

"Oh well," he said, shrugging. He had nothing else to say.

"I talk to them. I tip well, or not badly, at least. Well, no biggie."

There was silence then for a bit, during which Winnick listened to the basketball players' shoes squeaking on the court. He drank his shot and sipped his beer.

"Saw a good movie the other day, up in the room," the man said, yawning mid-sentence. Winnick was starting to regret his decision to come to the bar, but he'd felt the need to let some time pass, and to cool his mind.

"Oh yeah?" he said.

"Yeah. Not porno. This was, it was one of those movies where it's a bunch of kids, and they're grown up, and they all come home for their class reunion, and everything's changed and whatever, one of the kids had died, and nobody could, you know, this kid was everybody's best friend back in school, you know? I don't know, it was kind of good. It made me kind of think, though, you know, I never go home, never go to any reunions, but it made me think maybe I should. See how everyone is, and who's who. I had some good times in high school -- "

"Right," said Winnick, nodding.

" -- okay? Good friends, real good friends, and I don't know where the fuck any of them ended up. Isn't that sad? You ever been to a class reunion?"

"No, never."

"Yeah, me neither! We should go. Not together," the man said, laughing, "because how well could that go? But you know, I think it's something that's good to do for yourself, if nothing else. But I liked the movie. It was called Remember That Time. You should order it. It's like five bucks."
"I will," said Winnick. He drank his beer down halfway.

"Sorry," said the man, after a while. "I get very conversational when I travel, with anybody I see." He held up his drink and showed it to Winnick. "And plus this. But I get restless when I travel, and I do a lot of it, so that probably can't be good, right?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Winnick; then, saying something he'd been led to believe was true, "It's good to travel."

"Maybe," the man said, sipping. "If you're going to Europe or wherever with your family. But I'm traveling so I can tell some guy 'You don't need to fire these people because we made such-and-such money last year.' That's not fun. That's not relaxing.

"No, I guess -- "

"Not that I want anybody to get fired, but it's no fun. What if they don't believe me? Or they decide it's not enough money? That's not fun."

"Maybe you should quit," said Winnick.

"I probably should have, years ago," the man said, nodding. "A bit late now. Christ, how many of these have I had?" He stared at his glass, as if he'd just realized it wasn't what he'd ordered. He looked back at Winnick. "What do you do?"

"Sales," Winnick said, without thinking.

"Christ," the man said, "quit now. You're young, get out. That's like, Put me in jail, but you gotta pay me, but not enough. Fuck it. I did that. Never again."

Winnick's mind fogged out for a second, and he remembered something he'd done several months ago. There was a woman lying in the middle of her living room, and her torso was opened up, and her intestines were lying all around her, spread out like stereo cable. And Winnick was standing above her, wondering what to do next.

Also, that same night -- and least he thought it was that night -- he had found a five-dollar bill on the steps outside his apartment. Along the top, in tiny print, someone had written: Give to Charles for video games.

Winnick shook off the memories and said to the man, "It's just what I'm doing until something better comes along."

"Yeah, but don't get caught sitting around. There's that saying, 'Life's what happens when you're sitting around?' And that's very true, my friend. When you start just sitting around, it'll eat up everything."

"Well, yeah, I know," said Winnick, finishing his beer. "That's what my wife says."

"Your wife's right. You movin' on?"

Winnick had started to stand.

"Yeah," he said. "Got to."

"Well, it was nice meeting you. I hope I didn't talk you to death."

"No, no," Winnick assured him.

The man put his hand out so Winnick could shake it, which he did.

"Mitch Downey," the man said. "Good to meet you."

"Paul Crosby," said Winnick. "Same to you."

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END PART TWO

A Story - Part One

Click here for the announcement.

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To the people of Queens,
I love you. And I
want to wish all of
you a Happy Easter.
May God bless you
in this life and in
the next. And for now
I say goodbye and
goodnight.

- Son of Sam letter


Stuck outside of a shut-down barbershop, near the mouth of a wide, trash-packed alley, a phone booth was lit up, cold and white. Inside, a man tapped out his home phone number on the keypad.

"Hey baby, it's me...Nope. I'm sorry, I'm stuck, I can't get away."

On the street behind him, a cab almost hit a kid dressed all in black who was skateboarding at 9:00 in the evening. The kid skipped his board up on the curb between two parked cars and glared after the cab. The kid thought, but didn't say, things like "Fuck you" and "Fuck off".

"No, it's the Vasey people," the man in the booth said. "They got me, they want me to go out with them. To, well I guess to commemorate the deal."

This was a quiet part of the street. Another car passed, its headlights dancing over the chrome inside the barbershop. Not far away, someone was yelling loudly for someone else to come here and shut up.

"Well, no, I mean, I'm not that far away. I'm only like three, four blocks from the hotel, and I think we're probably just going to go to some place called Olson's for some drinks."

Across the street, a couple stories up, a woman opened a screen door and stepped out onto her balcony. She lit a cigarette and craned her neck so she could still watch TV while she smoked. From the street, the TV could be seen flickering on the opposite wall.

"Because they just told me. No, I'm walking. They'll already be there when I get there, so...No more than an hour, I don't think...No, I doubt it, I mean, it's just sort of like, you know, 'Good job, everyone. Let's all do a shot!'. It won't be..."

From the darkness of the wide-mouthed alley, a man in a slick yellow coat, who was holding a 40 oz. that was half-full of urine-colored beer, shuffled towards the phone booth. He stopped, his body lightly tilted to the left, and stared curiously at the man inside. He did this only for a second before turning his back.

"Okay. I'll call you from Olson's before I leave...I know, but you'll be up, right? No, I know, right. Okay, I love you, baby. Okay, see you soon. Bye, I love you."

He hung up and stepped out of the phone booth. As he did, the drunk in the yellow coat slipped and stumbled, his beer dropping from his hand. The bottle rang off the concrete but didn't break. As it rolled towards the outer wall of the babershop, the beer foamed and crept up the funnel-shaped neck.

"Wup, shit," the drunk muttered, landing on one knee and staying there, head down, as though waiting for a wave of sickness to pass.

The man from the phone booth stopped and watched him. As he watched, the drunk shook his head and muttered some more before sliding both legs out in front of him so that he sat down, hard. He sat there and watched his beer bottle clink against the barbershop's red brick. He huffed out a long sigh and coughed.

"You all right?" the man said, a little quietly, maybe hoping the drunk wouldn't hear him. The drunk shook his head, possibly in response, maybe in reference to something inside himself he privately disagreed with.

"You okay?" the man asked, now taking a few steps toward the drunk. "I saw you go down. You bang your knee?"

As the man got closer, the drunk tilted his head back, the man appearing to him upside down.

"Oh, hey buddy," the drunk said. "Naw, my knee's...I don't know. I lost my beer."

"I saw that. You need help up, or what?"

The drunk's hair was short and ruffled, but a quick combing would have fixed it. His coat was slightly beat to hell, but otherwise he didn't seem too weathered. The man wondered if the bender this man had evidently been on was just a one-off, something spurred by a temporary bout of depression, which, once it had been replaced by a hangover, might not reoccur. This idea somehow made the man less willing to help in whatever small way he could, but he was committed now.

"Yeah, man," the drunk said, nodding. Nodding had replaced head-shaking, perhaps indicating a positive change in his general outlook. He lowered his head, seeming suddenly tired, and lifted his hand so the man could take it. The man did, and braced his legs before pulling the drunk up.

"There you go," the man said.

The drunk plunged a knife, long and thick, into the man's guts. With one hand clutching the back of the man's head, and the other curled around the handle of the knife, he drove the man back into the shadows of the alley. The man started to make noises -- wet, catching noises -- like someone closing their throat to keep from vomiting. His eyes grew large and he began to sweat. Blood ran over the drunk's hand, and some splattered over his body. The blood ran off his coat like water.

"This isn't how you thought it would go for you, is it?" the drunk said. His voice was calm. He twisted the knife hard three times until the man sat down, back into a pile of stuffed garbage bags. The drunk sawed at him, opening a mouth in the man's belly. The man gurgled and cried out, so the drunk closed a hand around his throat, cutting off his voice.

He removed the dripping knife and set it aside. The man's eyes were glazing over, so he tentatively removed his hand from the man's throat. The man didn't scream, though his breathing was loud and quick. The drunk looked at the slit in the man's belly and slowly wormed his hand inside. The man was about to scream, he could tell, so he took a great handful of what he found in there and pulled down. The fistful held, and the man's mouth dropped open, as though what his killer held, so deep inside him, was somehow directly connected to his brain stem. Then his eyes rolled back, and his appearance now resembled the photograph of a ghost.

His killer let go and looked into the man's swimming eyes.

"This is it," he said. "No more for you."

The man's eyes rolled as the drunk put his hand over his mouth and pressed. Then, with his other hand, he retrieved the knife and slashed open the man's throat, moving back slightly as the blood washed down. The man died there, and his killer, long having shed his drunk act, took the man's wallet from his back pocket, and stuffed his corpse into a deep pile of trash. He then took off his coat, threw that on the body, wiped the knife free of prints, and added that to the mess. Finally, he covered everything over. Quickly washing his hands in what was left of the beer, and throwing the empty bottle deep into the back of the alley, he then opened the man's wallet, to see what there was to see.

The dead man's name had been Dennis Scott. The address on his license wasn't local, but there was a keycard for a room at the Global, which was just four or so blocks east of where his killer now stood. His killer, who name was Sam Winnick, turned in that direction and saw the glowing top of the Global and the red light flashing on the hotel's antenna tower, which looked like a dead star. Thumbing through the wallet again, he found photos, family photos, old parents, a young wife, maybe a brother. There was a little money. Winnick looked at the photo of the woman he presumed was Dennis Scott's wife, and he thought of the conversation Scott was having in the phone booth.

He turned and walked east.

____________
END PART ONE

I'm Getting Ready to Do Something I Probably Shouldn't

The other day, I went to a website I hadn't visited in a very long time. After browsing through it for a few minutes, I came to a decision. How momentous a decision, in the grand scheme of things, I don't know -- probably not very -- but for me, right now, it's sort of a big deal.

This is the website in question. I've been aware of Nedroid for a while, and I've always found him very funny, and an immensely talented artist. I mean, look at some of that stuff. Even the pictures that look like doodles are, I think, pretty great, and when you look at his more detailed work it's hard to not think he should be getting paid for this. And he's just throwing it up there for free. Maybe he has all sorts of deals with book companies or paying websites that I don't know about, and by all rights he should, but I don't think so.

So, I'm about to follow suit. I can't draw, so don't worry about that, but I do write stories. I'd rather not get into my personal writing history, such as it is, right now, but it's something I've done off and on (mostly, sad to say, off for the last several years) since I was a kid. And recently, for the first time in a long time, I actually finished something. Broadly speaking, it's a horror story (that's how I think of it anyway, although some may quibble with that designation), and the market for that kind of fiction is pretty abysmal these days. That might sound like an excuse to you, and maybe it is, but it's also true. There are no good magazines for it that I'm aware of, and even my decision to embrace New Technology and submit it to an on-line magazine that actually pays hit a roadblock when I discovered that my story is too long. The magazine has a maximum word count for the stories they publish -- as do all such magazines, on-line or otherwise -- and my story exceeds it.

Which leaves me where? With possibly more options than I'm either willing to admit or prepared to look into, but looking at Nedroid's site the other day has inspired me to take the step of putting my story up here, for free, for everyone to read and comment on. What I ultimately hope to gain from this, I don't really know, but I feel like simply putting it out there is a big enough step for my lazy ass that it's worth taking.

To be honest, the idea has been in my head for a few months, and one of the big reasons I haven't gone through with it is because my story doesn't have a title. I think titles are important, and I love a good title, but apparently -- lately, anyway -- I'm absolutely terrible at coming up with them. I do hope to be able to finally find the right one for my story before I actually put it up, but if I can't, then this thing'll just go up as "Untitled". I hope that doesn't happen, but the reason I'm putting up this post now, at least a few days before I put up the story, is to basically force myself across the line, the point of no return. I'm on record now, so...

A couple more things: the story isn't that long -- in manuscript form, it's a little over 20 pages, which I'd call average for a short story -- but it's long enough that I'm going to break this up into parts. I don't know how many posts this will take up, and I won't until I start actually breaking it down, but the point is that this will be a kind of series. Or serial, if you will. Also, if the story were to get an MPAA rating, it would be rated R, for Violent Killing, Suggestive Times, and Swear Talking. So if that's not your kind of thing, this counts as your warning.

Okay, well, that's it. I'm on record. Look for Part One in a few days, and please don't hesitate to leave comments on the story itself, whatever you think of it.